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Comment by bsima | Hacker News Reader

Why is a new and cheaper desalination invention in the news every 3-4 years?

Water and food are the absolute essentials to life. If meta came up with a new product, you can ignore it, but you cannot ignore water scarcity.

Most nations are beginning to deal with intense water pressure issues. Especially as seasons don't follow the patterns so perfectly. A flash drought could cripple almost all water and excessive underground water pumping sinks the land. See china's issue with random potholes due since the land is sinking.

Modern water desalination is quite new, so technology has much room to grow. Not only does that make it attractive in terms of patents for better systems, but also there's always a market.

Water is important.

And fresh water is increasingly scarce, and desalination is energy intensive.

And since we’re stating the obvious, seawater is particularly abundant.

and seawater is salty, making it unfit for drinking and irrigation

I feel like we see these in that cadence, but do we see them becoming commercially viable or actually in use at scale at all?

I don’t know about elsewhere but I live in Perth and we have a desalination plant that supplies 15% of our drinking water.

https://www.watercorporation.com.au/Our-water/Desalination/P...

I think we've got another one at Alkimos that supplies another 15% or so right? I think we are projected to have the majority of our drinking water come from desal over the next few decades.

Desal is cheap as chips compared to Water Corp's supply charge!

Yeah Alkimos just past the private school.

And it’s a pretty recent thing too since we realised we couldn’t just blindly drain the underground water and the rain had become insufficient for our long term population growth predictions.

The world leader in desalination is Saudi Arabia with it producingover 37% of their water supply

> Water desalination in Saudi Arabia has doubled over the past decade to reach 2.2 billion cubic meters in 2021 [0]

Then United States is right behind at #2. It does seem like a lot is happening it just has to be the perfect storm of correct conditions.

[0] https://www.arabnews.com/node/2160116

It's important news for dry countries and regions.

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